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^When I was having trouble with Hershyzer/shift from behind, I had to think "keep my butt pointed toward the line of play" at one point to help break the incorrect rotation. You'll likely need to overcorrect the action to break the motion pattern to replace it with a new one. It might feel like it's silly and you wonder "how can I possibly swing toward the target like that?" Don't worry, it'll happen.
^When I was having trouble with Hershyzer/shift from behind, I had to think "keep my butt pointed toward the line of play" at one point to help break the incorrect rotation. You'll likely need to overcorrect the action to break the motion pattern to replace it with a new one. It might feel like it's silly and you wonder "how can I possibly swing toward the target like that?" Don't worry, it'll happen.
Ah yes, the old over correction because feel isn't real.
Looking around, this seems to be something that a lot of people struggle with.
That's such a crazy feeling to overcome, but if cynthia can do it...
Does this look closer? should I be striding longer? This definitely feels like I'll butt plant if I don't catch myself. But I do feel it slightly in my quads, which is what SW warned about.
The reason this works btw is that when you swing from behind that brace, the follow through is what opens the foot up toward the target. If you rotate like you were before it leaks power out ahead of the swing. When you build from this action instead you can start getting much more significant ground force & weight into your swing.
Moving from the more "anterior" quad-centric loading to the "posterior" glute-centric loading we want helped me a lot. You want to get in a comfortable, athletic, posterior load at address:
For strides, you should be able to "shift from behind" regardless of the stride length (Clement vid in post 32). I agree w/ the wisdom of starting with small/in place shifts. As you lengthen the stride other problems usually become more obvious, but it's harder to fix the initial shift in a full range of motion if you're not used to it.
Conserving power and safely rotating you through. Makes. Absolute. Sense.
He talks about it 20 seconds later, but trying to recreate that just now, weight needs to be more anterior (toward the camera)?
I see what you mean in your series about having to refer back to different videos, you see more and more detail every time, which reinforces something else. I feel like I'm group reading Vonnegut.
Moving from the more "anterior" quad-centric loading to the "posterior" glute-centric loading we want helped me a lot. You want to get in a comfortable, athletic, posterior load at address:
For strides, you should be able to "shift from behind" regardless of the stride length (Clement vid in post 32). I agree w/ the wisdom of starting with small/in place shifts. As you lengthen the stride other problems usually become more obvious, but it's harder to fix the initial shift in a full range of motion if you're not used to it.
I can't believe you posted this for two reasons
1) You got me when I was thinking about how to respond to your first comment.
2) I was just about to say that it feels like I'm twisting my lumbar spine, which I know is terrible from the trauma literature.
I'm definitely squatting. So my non-academic interpretation is that I need to bend at the waist to activate the glutes. EDIT (which my body seems to automatically want to bend my knees in response to).
There's another puzzle piece!
^Yep, butt "back", not "down". You can't swivel the hips correctly if you start in the quad-dominant position.
My understanding too is that you never want to twist through the lumbar region. For lumbar region/spine neutrality + safety, I think mine was decent from dance experience, but I didn't develop good athletic control until I used kettlebells/heavy hammers. I'd get the leg stuff worked out per above (legs are an ongoing but progressing battle for myself), but Atlas swings with side or overhand grip helped me.
Fair warning - a lot of online golf and kettlebell instructors actually have incorrect pelvic tilt + "S-curve" in their spine. That's why I picked the PT guy in the "Hinge" clip above because he appears to have decent spine/pelvis position. So if you can swing in front of mirror/get video it can help you check + correct any weird spine stuff.
Conserving power and safely rotating you through. Makes. Absolute. Sense.
He talks about it 20 seconds later, but trying to recreate that just now, weight needs to be more anterior (toward the camera)?
I see what you mean in your series about having to refer back to different videos, you see more and more detail every time, which reinforces something else. I feel like I'm group reading Vonnegut.
This happens to me literally every time I go back to one of SW22's vids, whether it's what he says or how he moves. If I ever discover something he hasn't thought of I will be sure to announce it very loudly.
I went to DGLO yesterday and was watching Kevin Jones/Emerson Keith/Chandler Fry and had a thought that kind of escaped me when I watch video.The main takeaway was the figure 8 move. I think I get it, and why your butt has to counter the arm.
I made a few swing sketches to make sure I'm understanding this. In these sketches, I'm trying to hold on to the disc and not put much force into it. Balance still looks off, but I'm exaggerating:
1) Motion makes the arm move in counterclockwise circle and if you squint you can see it mirrored on the other side. Having the pressure behind me moves with the disc.
2) Shift from behind.
Okay. If this isn't the shift from behind, I give up. (just kidding). As I'm in the backswing I feel foot pressure moving counter clockwise. This suddenly shifts to the left instep of my lead foot.
3) Swinging Arm movement.
Here is where I'm questioning everything. I can feel lag/heave/weightlessnes BUT it all stems from my shoulder "folding" inward/outward. I don't want to misdiagnose the movement but if I'd guess it's retraction/protraction. I'm pointing at my shoulders and what I think I've been doing poorly. It's not as simple as throwing your shoulder into retraction?
I'd keep after the feet. Looks like in vid 1 you've got part of the Figure 8 and vid 2 you're getting some buttwipe, but the correct transition off the drive leg requires you not to let the rear knee leak outside the rear ankle & away from the line of play.
Right now you allow your CoG to swing back over and out of that rear leg rather than making it stay leveraged. That rear leg needs post you up with the disc & arm extending into the peak of the backswing. Compare your leg and posture to SW22:
He's got the CoG and head stacked up nicely with the disc in a nice backswing coil because that rear leg redirects the force more vertically up the leg into the rear hip with the shoulder swinging back away from the line of play. As a result, you can tell that his body is coiled up to unload a much more powerful swing much earlier in the Figure 8 action.
You want that rear leg to redirect the rear hip up and back targetward in a pogo-like action. The more vertical coiling relative to yours also sets up the buttwipe very naturally. The overall swing will feel much easier when you get them synced up.
Here's me doing a backswing a bit faster when it first clicked. Notice that it's a little more raw than SW22's & there's a little bit of visible looseness/bounce in the action in my legs allowing me to pop back into the back of the backswing. I picked this one out since sometimes it's hard to see those aspects when the form gets very tight. Don't need to put a lot of effort in, just a nice easy action. I'm still working on tightening up this pogo and rear leg leverage myself.
DANG. I didn't realize that. Always hear post up on the front but not the back. (EDIT: I'm sure it's been said a ton of times and I selectively didn't hear it. ha)
I was doing that move wrong.
Thanks for the visual. If my attempt just now is somewhat comparable, I think I feel a (comparatively) insane amount of torque. Will spend some time with it.
Oh my... THAT'S WHY HE CALLED IT THE REVERSE STRIDE DRILL.
How on earth did I get through grad school? lol
Reverse stride is in terms of Bagwell to Griffey (away from line of play) I think, but basically I think SW22 generally pointing out that there are many equal and opposite actions using linear forces to cause rotations and counterrotations is helpful, and his drills are good at isolating those mechanics. The rear leg and front leg work exactly the same like walking, but the posture in the BH can make it look different at first. Reverse stride puts a lot of demand on the rear side functioning well and requires good leg mechanics to hip rock into it correctly. My drive leg never really got the hang of the difference between posting up and leaking into a different hinge until I started learning to swing my CoG in a deeper stance from further forward to further back into that rear side action in Reverse Stride.
Since good form has so many interdependencies in motion it's hard to anticipate which ones will click immediately and which will take work to get the Gestalt action flowing easily. But in general getting the legs fully under you with the right mechanics makes it easier. I don't think the arm adjustments SW22 is recommending now would have worked so fast with bad weight loading and crummy leg mechanics and poor rocking. Conversely, if I didn't have a well-reinforced loose Dingle arm in some form I probably would not have figured out how to get my CoG fully leading the swing with one change. It was like death by a thousand cuts and then suddenly things started to gel in bunches. I assume there are still surprises yet to come.
My grad school probably only gave me the ability to intellectualize all of this, which has probably mucked me up along the way far more than I'd like
Well it's been a while. I hurt my shoulder pretty badly in August and was sidelined for most of it and September. Worked with a ball golf instructor a lot this winter to get more efficient at using the ground.
Since my last post, my disc speed via radar is up ~12-15 mphs. Swings without the walk-ups tend to have higher speeds, so I've been exclusively throwing without it.
I'm here because a few different people have told me that they think I'm over rotating my *shoulders* after the backswing. Originally, I assumed this meany my hips (per ). Follow up resulted in them telling me to actively "slow down" and "stop" my shoulders from rotating forward to transfer energy into the disc.
WARNING: Flashing lights from the refresh rate on my phone's camera.... or the lights in the basement(?). Will try to figure out how to fix...
I can see that my lead shoulder is creeping up a bit at the pocket :\ and that my timing with the tip of the backswing is a little too early relative to my lead heel dropping. Can't seem to iron that out.
Sorry about the shoulder but glad you took time to work on those!
SW might attack a different cause. At first glance:
1. I think your pelvis is too open to the target in the setup. Get the booty more "preset" toward the target. Hershyzer, but SW also shared this one that somehow started to get through to me (you can do it without the cross): https://youtu.be/GL3wZvA_MBk?t=5. Also literally holding a shovel and doing a shoveling motion from the front leg before rocking back and doing it on two legs. Also two-handed medicine ball toss into the wall.
2. I think you are perilously close to a "chicken" wing in the setup. Compare to SW's relaxed but aggressive pump position. Yes, you want the elbow to lead, but it's possible to overdo it and creep out of leverage. Even just a bit screws up the whole force transfer. This also got better for me as my posture and action against the ground improved.
It looks like someone amputated your feet. Let's get those back.
I saw someone mention that they wouldn't post anywhere until they knew they fixed everything obvious. Reminded me of grad school when people would get upset that they didn't ace a test or whatever. Silly.
I've put some work into this (preventing the chickenwing while still elbow leading and the hershyzer). I was seeing some distance gains and much smoother releases and then *something happened*: I easily lost 50 feet and the very wobbly flight paths. My shoulder has been noticeably sore, so a few rest days are in order. Any ideas on what to work on? More hershyzer? Better posture/balance? You tell me
Edit: reminder that it's going to flash like crazy. Please speed up the playback speed
*i wrote way too much, so here are my major points*
1) Ball golf foot video
What I gathered from that great video (seriously awesome) was that I don't have a strong enough base to push off of and I'm not posting my leg enough. I did some chair work, but my place really isn't big enough for this. I'll take advantage of the office space sometime next week.
2) What I worked on
In the mean time, I tried to focus on this with more door frame drills. I'm getting the same disc speed (41-44) with less force than before (at least that's what I'm telling myself). Pausing at 10 seconds, my foot looks a lot more like the foot from the video in 1. Image below.
Anyone with a trained eye want to weigh in?
Overall, it feels better but less distance... It does feel like a different motion, I'm hoping that I just need to learn to be more efficient.
3) more leg
Should I be aiming for a straighter leg (like Bradley Williams below)? is my leg straightening up under me and not in front of me putting me at a mechanical disadvantage?
I'm mostly wondering because this feels similar to how my ball golf swing feels when completed.
One of the persistently confusing things about swing development is how the parts interact with each other, and how some movements get better as a unit, or how some actions block other specific movements.
Here, I see the pronounced rising shoulder in your plant when you swing and lack of side bend. When you couple that with what SW pointed out in the last video, it makes it a bit easier for you to coil and load through the core, and also how you balance and shift off the rear side. It's about the dynamic alignment across the whole body.
So I might say keep working on SW's point - thorough reinforcement saves you time later.
I think you can also start playing with the drills that really demand side bend (door frame drill, load the bow). You want to get the move and balance on the rear leg connected to that, which also helps some of what happens on the plant side when you land, including potentially mitigating your rising shoulder if all goes well. I needed this additional isolating drill to find it more reliably myself:
It feels rediculously easier and more powerful when you start to get it, and will continue to improve as parts of the rest of your swing will improve. Motor learning is recursive.
I also don't mind it when people want to use a more conservative "cradle" pump, but if you don't get the "heave" or "pulled taut" through the core when you "leave it behind" or "extend back" it spoils the shift too - need to be getting pulled taut during the shift until you land to swing and release the energy. I think you're not quite getting that and it is very hard or impossible to achieve without decent side bend. It got much easier for me after feeling the door frame physically help coil me and get me a bit stretched out in the backswing.
IMO it is never a bad time to improve your Dingle arm and you should do a little bit of it often. So many peoples' mechanics are so flat that they need a massive counter-example to train their alignments to be more fluid and wave-like. Gurthie is a very circular/windmilling form, and that's not where most players will end up. But recall that all of these players have a wave-like component across their whole body. The Dingle arm is a tried and true way to improve that. As recently as today I keep rediscovering how much I can improve my move just making tweaks in the Dingle. It is a well-integrated move for the whole chain. It's like eating vegetables for your chain to get you out of "flatville" fundamentally and more permanently:
If you do it, let me show you a rear view because I want to help you see where power comes from posture and how the swing should align. You want to do it swinging through more like SW here on the right and less like me. Gradually you will feel more and more compressed and powerful and stacked swinging off the front leg. Notice where his head is relative to his ankle, and where his arm swings through quite directly toward the target. If you keep the disc/hammer leveraged correctly, it'll probably feel pretty "vertical" to you at first and your body will eventually understand how it results in a flatter (shallow hyzer) swing plane later on. Chain-wise, it's also fundamentally consistent with a more horizontal form if that's what you're going for.
And throw outside whenever possible. I know it's hard.
Also PSA/reminder - it's healthy to expect distance drops at first, then gains as your body recalibrates and syncs up. Sometimes the distance goes up right away, sometimes it doesn't. Eye on the prize.
One of the persistently confusing things about swing development is how the parts interact with each other, and how some movements get better as a unit, or how some actions block other specific movements.
Here, I see the pronounced rising shoulder in your plant when you swing and lack of side bend. When you couple that with what SW pointed out in the last video, it makes it a bit easier for you to coil and load through the core, and also how you balance and shift off the rear side. It's about the dynamic alignment across the whole body.
Just for my own comprehension and sanity:
big picture, the theme here, is that I'm having issues connecting the different parts of the swing. The rising shoulder/lack of side bend combo is specifically detrimental.
It feels rediculously easier and more powerful when you start to get it, and will continue to improve as parts of the rest of your swing will improve. Motor learning is recursive.
I also don't mind it when people want to use a more conservative "cradle" pump, but if you don't get the "heave" or "pulled taut" through the core when you "leave it behind" or "extend back" it spoils the shift too - need to be getting pulled taut during the shift until you land to swing and release the energy. I think you're not quite getting that and it is very hard or impossible to achieve without decent side bend. It got much easier for me after feeling the door frame physically help coil me and get me a bit stretched out in the backswing.
3) I'm not particularly attached to the cradle. I was doing a forward pump for a while, but stopped because I've been getting very wobbly results (semi less wobbly with cradle). It sounds like the pump isn't the problem, I will revisit.
4)Dingle Arm
Will also spend some time with the dingle arm and report back. What's the best way to practice it? Should I simply work on the movement in the SW gif? Try to reduce to a more horizontal plane?
Again, Brychanus thank you for your time and encouragement.
Just for my own comprehension and sanity:
big picture, the theme here, is that I'm having issues connecting the different parts of the swing. The rising shoulder/lack of side bend combo is specifically detrimental.
3) I'm not particularly attached to the cradle. I was doing a forward pump for a while, but stopped because I've been getting very wobbly results (semi less wobbly with cradle). It sounds like the pump isn't the problem, I will revisit.
4)Dingle Arm
Will also spend some time with the dingle arm and report back. What's the best way to practice it? Should I simply work on the movement in the SW gif? Try to reduce to a more horizontal plane?
Again, Brychanus thank you for your time and encouragement.
1. Yep. I found it easier to see looking at the very long, thin players like Eagle at first.
2. Yes. SW had me do a version of that foot-together drill one armed with a mallet too at one point. It's ok if the arm even curls behind you a little as long as you don't collapse at the shoulder swinging forward (hammer toss drill). The arm should feel like it's helping coil you up away from the target as you are shifting forward so that when you land in the plant you release that coil/elasticity.
3. IMHO/experience the pendulum tends to be much easier to generate "free" momentum and backswing tension, but can also destabilize you quickly if you don't have good posture control. Opposite problem for the cradle pump - maybe a little easier to get parts of the legs and exact side bend sorted out, but it can be challenging to get that backswing tension at first "leaving the disc behind." People often forget that even Paul McBeth started using a pendulum before he moved to his little pump. I have learned from both and I eventually just decided to stick with a pendulum, possibly because of my body type and how much more easily I can get pulled taut by the weight of my arm swinging back anchored by my drive leg. So I think it's healthy to tinker with it here and there. Basically however you get what the door frame drill teaches you about coiling is what you want.
4. Exactly like he does it, and over time your posture and motion in that move will improve too. I still use it to warm up all the time. Honestly, I think the thing that is undervalued about things like the Dingle arm is that bodies naturally like to move in flows and waves for power in harmony with gravity. I can think of no exception to that in athletics.
The tricky part with Dingle arms is "retrofitting" it into your body for your personal form and find the leverage chain that gives you the most efficient power. Eagle is very horizontal and has a very shallow pendulum or wave - but I would still never call it "flat" on a line diagram. GG is very vertical and has a nearly circular pattern. Most people will probably end up in between.
My point is how you use it to reprogram your body and brain about what the swing is. It won't immediately fix a swing, but it will improve it over time - whole body kinetic retraining. Get your arm to feel fairly loose and heavy. Pay attention to the weight of your arm, how and when it accelerates, and how that all relates to your feet and ground pressure. Play a bit with the swing path. Notice when your pressure in your feet flows from instep to instep smoothly yet quickly everting the ground away behind you in the shift. Take it narrow, take it wide. Add stagger, shift "from behind" diagonally. See if you can speed it up smoothly with as little effort as possible. Make sure you've got some resistance through your calves/plantar flexion. Legs should still feel athletic and a little bouncy even though it doesn't look like they're doing much. Riddle: where does the power come from? Don't answer that now.
As is often the case, we just saw another round of drill confusion, skepticism, and language quagmires on the Forums. If you spend enough time in the "Search" function, you realize that it's just a new flavor of the month, and some people have a harder time learning it than others. A lot of it is the medium of a forum like this and the kinds of people it attracts, I reckon. So let's ignore that and focus on motions. Let me give you an N=1 case example of the Dingle arm. Notice that in my first throw here, the mechanics of my throw basically replicate what happened in my Dingle arm, just bringing it through a (deficient) x-step. The initial dingle pump is a little askew from ideal like in my comparison to SW I showed you above. My actual throw still has several problems that are directly related to that skew. Notably, these became more obvious again throwing outside freely relative to throwing in my basement. So I realized I could go back and start to work on a few alignment problems at once just by adjusting my Dingle drill move a bit and then trying to bring that into my preshot routine and swing next time - because enough of my chain flows together for me to do that at this point, and I my body is more and more attuned to the changes I make. The Dingle was one of the first moves I started with and now I'm very glad I've been doing it for months. This is why SW is also right to get you to control specific pieces of your mechanics along the way. The parts + the whole working together with practice and time.
Do drills build throws? Are throws decomposable into drills? I leave that to the jury, but whatever the case, I'm throwing pretty far with next to no effort even with swing misalignment and leg health issues. I wonder what will happen as it keeps improving.
Oh - and remember that swing power has a lot to do with ground pressure, which you can't directly observe on camera. That's part of why people around here get confused as hell. But from one lever-deficient man to another, I assure you that it's there.
